e
of "those elements in human life which merit a place in heaven." "The
true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than
man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found
in mathematics as surely as in poetry."

This enthusiastic language might have, I should think, an opposite
effect upon some readers to that which Mr. Russell desires. It might
make them suspect that the claim to know an absolute ideal necessity,
so satisfying to one of our passionate impulses, might be prompted by
the same conceit, and subject to the same illusion, as the claim to
know absolute truth in religion. Beauty, when attributed to necessary
relations between logical entities, casts a net of subjectivity over
them; and at this net the omnivorous empiricist might be tempted to
haul, until he fancied he had landed the whole miraculous draught of
fishes. The fish, however, would have slipped through the meshes; and
it would be only his own vital emotion, projected for a moment into
the mathematical world, that he would be able to draw back and hug to
his bosom. Eternal truth is as disconsolate as it is consoling, and as
dreary as it is interesting: these moral values are, in fact, values
which the activity of contemplating that sort of truth has for
different minds; and it is no congruous homage offered to ideal
necessity, but merely a private endearment, to call it beautiful or
good. The case is not such as if we were dealing with existence.
Existence is arbitrary; it is a questionable thing needing
justification; and we, at least, cannot justify it otherwise than by
taking note of some affinity which it may show to human aspirations.
Therefore our private endearments, when we call some existing thing
good or beautiful, are not impertinent; they assign to this chance
thing its only assignable excuse for being, namely, the service it may
chance to render to the spirit. But ideal necessity or, what is the
same thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself,
since it is not contingent or questionable at all. The affinity which
the human mind may develop to certain provinces of essence is
adventitious to those essences, and hardly to be mentioned in their
presence. It is something the mind has acquired, and may lose. It is
an incident in the life of reason, and no inherent characteristic of
eternal necessity.

The realm of essence contains the infinite multitude of Leibnitz's
possible worl